I'm three weeks into a 10 week course at l'Institut français to prepare for the DELF B2 exam in December. Here's a quick summary of why I'm taking the exam, and the presentation I did in class this week.

The subtitle of William Alexander’s Flirting with French, ‘how a language charmed me, seduced me and nearly broke my heart’ is particularly relevant given Alexander’s cardiac troubles over the course of the year he spends studying French (the question of their relatedness is left open...) It’s a tribute to his determination that he continued with his studies, and to his honest writing style that he included them in this book. Alexander is courageous in his learning and writing elsewhere in the book as well. The story of his much-anticipated meeting with his quirky young French pen pal that ended in him speaking entirely in English to her fiancé because they were unable to understand his French is positively cringe-worthy. For me, it also highlighted how lucky I am to be a French learner in London, where face-to-face exchanges with French people are easily-arranged and therefore charged with much less nervous anticipation.

I really like discovering that a politician, actor, singer or celebrity can speak French - especially when there is video evidence. Here's a compilation of clips of famous people speaking in French - and a little history about how they learned the language. Note, they are all at varying levels!

The French have an admirable sense that their language is so important that it should be kept pure. That means in particular protecting it from invasion by English. Interesting, then, that the body charged with protecting the French language, l'Académie Française, recently appointed an Englishman to one of its 40 chairs.

A friend recently told me about Le Gorafi - a satirical online French newspaper of the sort that will be very familiar to British readers of The Daily Mash or American readers of The Onion. The name comes from a misspelling of Le Figaro. Here are a few recent stories that I thought were pretty funny.